3. Personalize your offerings
Today’s consumers don’t want generic correspondences or one-size-fits-all offers. What they really crave are brands that show appreciation for support and loyalty by tailoring the consumer experience to meet their specific preferences and needs.
Use data to hone in on the tastes, habits, and preferences of your target audience members at each event you host. Look at the brands and items they typically interact with, purchases they’ve made, and what they enjoy most about face-to-face interactions.
Then, at the event, make simple but powerful gestures to show your attendees that you “get” them. Repeat their names frequently, offer customized buying options, and make suggestions based on trends they’re into—these are actions Accenture found consumers truly value.
4. Make longitudinal plans
Your marketing team puts so much effort into planning and coordinating the perfect event or experiential campaign. But even if everything goes off without a hitch, the impact of your efforts will be greatly diminished if you don’t have a plan in place for keeping those new consumers engaged long-term.
While creating positive experiences for your eventgoers is important, presenting opportunities to “spread the word” is exponentially more critical. It’s that word-of-mouth marketing that really influences the greatest number of consumers, builds the most brand trust, and offers the greatest return on investment. Ensure you’re regularly utilizing communication prompts—creative hashtags, mailing lists, photo contests, etc.—to keep consumers engaged well beyond the event’s conclusion.
At the same time, make sure you have a system (and team) in place to continually extract data from your long-term exchanges. Start with follow-up polls, surveys, and questionnaires, but you’ll likely get the best info from lengthier interviews, event reviews, and social media communities.
With the holiday shopping season now underway, it’s more important than ever that your marketing team finds innovative ways to appeal to your target audience. This year, leverage the right data with cutting-edge technology to elevate your events and create winning experiential marketing campaigns.
Glenn Chin is strategy director of Kenwood Experiences. He can be reached at [email protected].
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